Make America Grateful Again by Michael Waterson

(True Colors)

For purple mountains awing us with majesty
above golden fruited plains that feed so many;
for lakes of lapis lazuli, the great and small;
for verdant hills and rolling rivers,
with all their silver runs and rills;

for cathedral forests’ solemn beauty; for bounty from our moon-churned seas;
for hula hoops and all other kitschy varieties of apple-pie-eyed Americana;
for visionaries who fashion fiction into reality and harvest marvels;
for those who lie in rows beneath white crosses
who gave till they could give no more;

for all who came before
for holding high a torch, a beacon to the world
that promised Camelot, a shining city on a hill
for the tired, the poor, the yearning, huddled masses.
For all of these, for all we’ve got, in days gone by we’ve been so thankful.

But an orange horror stripped away our rosy shades,
exposing our true colors, revealing that mean green
is where we live today; that I, I am red-white-blue okay, but you—
you with your brown affections, your black religion,
you, babbling yellow gibberish— all of you most certainly are not

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Michael Waterson (he/him) is a retired journalist originally from Pittsburgh, PA. He earned a BA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and an MFA in poetry from Mills College. His work has appeared in numerous online and print journals such as The Bookends Review, Cold Mountain Review and Plainsongs. Several of his one act plays have been produced around the country. He is a singer/songwriter and seanachie (storyteller) with the traditional Irish music band Kith & Kin. He is poet laureate emeritus of Napa Valley.